We've all seen the footage of Hiroshima getting nuked. We've all seen footage of other nuclear blasts. We've probably even seen some of the propaganda films from the '50s about what to do in the event of a nuclear blast. "The Atomic Cafe" ties them all together masterfully. It starts with Hiroshima, and goes on to show Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Bikini Atoll, a meeting between Nixon and a Soviet leader, and other such stuff.

I guess that I might as well put in my two cents. Around the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I asked my Russian teacher if she remembered it. She remembered being shown a movie in school about how to help a person affected by nuclear fallout; in short, the USSR was as guilty as the USA (although we certainly put them in a hyper-defensive position). As for the Rosenbergs, I know their son Robert, and he always explains what the government did to his parents. On the 50th anniversary of his parents' execution, he noted that the "War on Terrorism" has replaced the Cold War.

The overall point is that watching this documentary, it's almost impossible to believe that people took this stuff seriously, but they did. And we still live with the Cold War's effects today.

No pun intended but this film is a blast. I only recently became aware of it and promptly decided to order it up via my local library. For someone like myself who lived through most of the era represented in these archival clips, it's a wistful, melancholy trip down memory lane. Like so many others growing up in the Fifties I remember quite vividly how we'd practice those duck and cover drills and stockpile canned goods in a secure room at school in case we found ourselves under attack by those pesky Russkies. The film instructively takes us on a chronological journey from the end of World War II through the Cold War paranoia of the Fifties and Sixties showing how the threat of nuclear war was to be taken seriously, or at least as seriously as the government would have us believe. You know, even as a kid I had a pretty good idea that kneeling next to a wall and covering my head with my hands would make me a goner if the real thing ever happened.

One of the more surreal moments offered here was that near rabid clergyman exhorting families with a fallout shelter to deny access to outsiders lest they imperil their own safety. It brought to mind that 1961 Twilight Zone episode 'The Shelter' which pretty much laid out the same scenario with some modification. In the story, a family man who built and supplied his own fallout shelter was besieged by his neighbors to allow them entry when the dreaded siren heralded a nuclear attack. The story demonstrated just how ugly people can become when faced with their own mortality; it was one of Rod Serling's better scripts.

In terms of sheer absurdity (and there were numerous examples), the suggestion that doubled me over had to do with providing a bottle of tranquilizers for an extended period in a bomb shelter. How else to contend with the paranoia and boredom of being cooped up while waiting for an emergency to be over. Which would be good advice if you had the foresight to locate your shelter at least twelve miles away from ground zero because otherwise you'd be toast. By the way, a bottle of a hundred would be about right.

For those of you interested in this type of stuff, the copy of "The Atomic Cafe" I watched came in a two DVD set from Docurama Films. The bonus disc features yet another eight government propaganda shorts from the era including 1951's 'Duck and Cover' with Bert the Turtle, and what looks like a must see - 'Self Preservation in an Atomic Attack'. For a more in depth treatment of the Bikini Atoll nuclear test, I'd recommend the 1988 documentary "Radio Bikini".

"The Atomic Cafe" is an interesting documentary that strings together US government propaganda films and archival footage from atomic era. Starting with the first atomic test through the Cold War, this film weaves these clips together into a history lesson. I appreciate how the clips were not just tossed together willy-nilly but actually were done chronologically and logically. At first, clips tend to talks very naively about the atomic bomb--showing solders watching the test blasts with minimal protection. Then the film focuses on fears in the West about communism and the Soviet Union.

So why is my score relatively low? Well, this film is a great example of too much. At about an hour and a half, the viewer is left numb--overwhelmed by too much. I think the film would have been better had it been shorter as sometimes more is not better. I found my attention drifting after a while and it was tough sticking with this one--even though it was clever.